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Do you have STRIPER FEVER? Sublimation and direct giclee printing allows for full color imprinting of these Striped Bass on several items. Click on this image above to see how one publisher has done this on many items you can purchase.

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Do you have CRAPPIE FEVER? Sublimation and direct giclee printing allows for full color imprinting of these crappie fish on several items. Click on this image above to see how one publisher has done this on many items you can purchase.

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In the spring of 1999 I needed to create a collection of digital fish paintings in order to sell the license to use them to one of my clients. About a dozen and a half different species were required and I knew that I would not only have to do a lot of research about the different species but that I’d need to develop drawing techniques never before known nor used by me.

This presentation is my journal of discovery and solution as I brought 30 years of traditional drawing and painting into a digital environment, portions of which became challenging and portions which became blissfully easier, as you’ll see.

The first step was to acquire decent side view drawings or photographs of each species to act as a guide for my outline work. Illustration 01 is the silhouette image I used to develop the Redbreasted Sunfish. This, along with color pictures from various fishing guidebooks, etc., provided my visual reference. In order to accommodate as many future uses of these drawings as possible, I decided to create them quite large with a medium resolution. This should allow me to use them in many ways, including my own note cards and T-shirts. I settled on a resolution of 200 dpi within a tabloid size page, or about fifteen inches wide. Each file eventually became about 90 megabytes in size with all of the layers and alpha channels I used.

Illustration 02 reveals the basic set of vector outlines I built based upon the underlying scanned image and my other references. You can see that I didn’t follow it precisely, improving certain shapes as I worked. The key thing to make you aware of is that all shapes are closed! Every line is connected. This is extremely important to this technique. Here’s why: These lines will be imported into Photoshop and there will serve as “friskets,” an old airbrush term. Only closed areas will work when I SELECT them with the MAGIC WAND tool. These selections will then become alpha channels within which I will spray color and texture. More on that in Tutorial 002.

You can see in Illustration 02, 03 and 04 that I built as many guidelines as possible to help me later in Photoshop. Precise lines were built for the spines of the fins and gill and eye anatomy. General guidelines were invented to indicate color blotches or patterns on the skin surface. These lines are kept thin, about half a point “stroke,” and each category, like “side fin” or “silhouette outline,” were on separate layers so I could bring them into Photoshop discretely as needed. Illustration 05 reveals the most useful and most inventive step in this entire lesson and I’ll take a little time now explaining the steps involved in building this “fish scale matrix.” Spend a little time studying Illustration 06.

Each fish species has its own scale pattern and you need to give this some thought before building your matrix. Carp, for example, have huge bold scales and Walleye have many many smaller scales. Knowing these proportions in advance will guide you in knowing how many scales to build across the surface of the fish’s body. In my assignment this was not a scientific illustration, with biological attention to detail regarding exactly how many scales per inch were on a given species for example. This was to be a digital interpretation of each fish, capturing the “look and feel” of each species, but with some digital and illustrative flare. The close up of the Striped Bass in this tutorial is a good example. It is eye catching and you know what species it is but it wouldn’t compare in anatomical detail to an actual fish mounted by a taxidermist.

So, in simple computer software terms, the steps in building this “scale” matrix are as follows: Follow the progress in Illustrations 06-A through 06-E.

On a blank page first build the vector shape of a single scale (06-A). SELECT it, and holding down the OPTION key (Macintosh), DRAG its duplicate into the next position desired (06-B). Again, study your fish. This relationship is different with each species. Then, while everything is still selected and active, you can type COMMAND-D (Macintosh) or use the DUPLICATE command (06-C). Continue this until you have more scales on an angle then you think you will eventually need on the final fish illustration. When you’ve built this long line of single scales, SELECT them ALL and GROUP them, so that you can move them as a unit. Center them on your page to the extreme left. Again, holding down the OPTION key (Macintosh), DRAG the duplicate line of scales to the right (it helps to hold down the SHIFT key to constrain this movement to a perfect horizontal direction) until you create a situation that looks like Illustration 06-D. Again, DUPLICATE this command over and over until you have a page full of scales like Illustration 06-E. This will look like a very large chicken wire fence. SELECT ALL, GROUP all, re-center whole image on your page and SAVE this file. You now have the key to building three dimensional scales later in Photoshop, in ways you can’t imagine right now.

Obviously, it is immediately apparent that the scales at the fish’s tail are smaller than the scales near the head or center body. So, we’re not done. I incorporated the use of a plugin software program called KPT Vector Effects (now obsolete). This was a few years ago, in Illustrator 8.0, and FRAMES, as a command, weren’t available. Regardless of how you do it today the principle is the same.

The entire body of scales are GROUPED and turned into a UNIT which can be re-shaped using FRAMES. Illustration 07 shows the beginning of the process of giving this mass of scales a more anatomical shape with smaller scales at the beginning and the tail. Illustration 08 is the finished file. I SAVED it with a new name, allowing me to re-use the original in another way.

This completes the portion of explaining how I used Illustrator 8.0 to create keylines for import into Photoshop for the purpose of creating a digital painting of several freshwater game fish. The color illustration below is the finished version of this Redbreasted Sunfish. Already, now, you can see how my guidelines played a part in establishing both hard and soft features in this painting. The process of importing, duplicating, using layers, custom brushes and alpha channels is explained in Tutorial 002.

GALLERY - Fish Paintings

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Created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop combined:

Species illustrated include:
Largemouth Bass, Carp, Smallmouth Bass, Pumpkinskin Sunfish, Walleye, Striped Bass, Black Crappie, Grass Pickerel, Yellow Perch, Spotted Bass, White Crappie, Bluegill, Sauger Fish, Red-breasted Sunfish, Northern Pike, Great Lakes Muskie,  White Bass.